ESCAPE: RETURN

A small escape – to a local garden at the height of spring – can also be a return.  A return to your senses and a grounded feeling of being-in-world.

It’s not really necessary to travel far in order to escape, is it?  What’s important is that your escape nudges you back towards the primordial ground of existence and returns you to a body-mind that allows wonder at the vastness of this world.

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These photographs were taken a few days ago at Bellevue Botanical Garden in Bellevue, Washington.

My brief  escape did the job. I returned to my senses and left my worries behind.

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In order, the plants are:

Allium ‘Globemaster’ (two photos)

Iris laevigata ‘Variegata’

Iris sibirica ‘Viel Schnee’

Iris confusa

Peony; unknown cultivar (two photos)

Papaver orientale; unknown cultivar  (Oriental Poppy)

Iris ‘Rosario’

Iris x hollandica ‘Symphoy’

Allium ‘Globemaster’ and Berberis thunbergii ‘Aurea’   (Ornamental Onion and Japanese Barberry)

Polygonatum; unknown cultivar and (?)  (Solomon’s Seal and ?)

Iris sibirica; unknown cultivar

Meconopsis ‘Lingholm’ (Himalayan Blue Poppy)

Hakonechloa and Hosta; unknown cultivars (Japanese Forest Grass and Hosta)

Iris sibirica ‘Penny’s Worth’

Hosta; unknown cultivar

Allium christophii  (Star of Persia Ornamental Onion)

Iris sibirica ‘Blue King’

Peony; unknown cultivar

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A plethora of other notions of what escape means can be found here.

PATTERNS

This week’s Daily Post Weekly Photo Challenge  is Pattern.  It’s everywhere.

Ponder this:

Does the key to the ubiquity of patterns in our world lie within our perceiving brain, or outside of us? Both? Is there any way to know?

And this:

“How is it that a man made, artificial, technological system is behaving like a natural system?  The more efficient it becomes, the more it looks like nature…”  From a video by Jason Silva called, TO UNDERSTAND IS TO PERCEIVE PATTERNS.

Watch it – it’s only 105 seconds long, and it will set your brain spinning.

Read about Jason Silva, who’s been called and “Idea DJ” whose short videos are “shots of philosophical espresso.”  Hey, no wonder I liked that video!

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Patterns have always motivated artists. Whether you locate them inside your perceiving brain, or outside in “nature”  (however you define that), they’re ubiquitous.   I need to narrow down this vast subject, so I’ve chosen patterns in leaves and branches, because they have interested me as long as I can remember.  I’ve abstracted these photographs in Photoshop, mostly using the Posterize and Cutout filters. It’s clear that the patterns I perceived here are at least partly inside my head.  I suspect some will resonate with patterns in your head, too.

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More PATTERNS await discovery at the Daily Post Weekly Photo Challenge.

To spin your mind harder, try googling “Pattern perception brain” and then add “Philosophy.”  The two links below look interesting, but it’s warm and sunny out, it’s spring, and I think my brain’s telling me it’s had enough of the computer screen. For now.

http://nivea.psycho.univ-paris5.fr/Synthese/MyinFinal.html

http://www.newdualism.org/papers/J.Smythies/Perception_1-1.htm

ABOVE IT ALL – BUT JUST A LITTLE

Another Photo Challenge is sparking ideas and sending photographers hunting for images taken “FROM ABOVE.”

Here is a collection of images, almost all from nature, that I have taken while looking down on my subject.

Since I was young I’ve liked looking down. Sometimes looking down flattens the space and creates interesting abstractions.

Sometimes looking down just keeps me anchored to the earth, or affords a view I hadn’t seen before.

Or, when there’s water involved, it’s a roundabout way of looking up.

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These photos were taken between January, 2010 and a few days ago, on Captiva Island, Florida, on the High Line in New York, at Bellevue Botanical Garden in Bellevue, Washington, at Snug Harbor Botanical Garden in New York, at Anthropologie in Philadelphia, in Spring Lake, New Jersey, near Tannersville, New York, along the Dosewallips River in Washington, in the Marckworth Forest in King County, Washington, in the Quinault Rainforest in Washington, and in old Robe Canyon on the South Fork Stillaguamish River in Washington.

More interpretations of this challenge can be found here.

Seattle’s Pike Place Flower Market

Since 1907, growers have been bringing produce to Pike Place Market to sell.  76 stalls were built that first year, and now hundreds of farmers, businesses and craftspeople sell goods at Pike Place Market to millions of people every year.   Residents and tourists wander the market for fresh food, fresh flowers, interesting crafts, books, foreign newspapers…it’s a concentrated mix of ingredients.  Perched along a steep hill overlooking the water and loaded with specialty food stores, musicians, fishmongers, and crowds snacking on anything from felafel to freshly made cheese, it’s a great place to spend the afternoon in early spring, when rows of flower stalls packed with a brilliant riot of tulips and daffodils are adding their bright colors to the scene.

Many of the flowers you see at Pike Place are grown and sold by Hmong immigrants, some of whom have been here since the early 80′s.

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Outside the market, a flower cart loaded with buckets of tulips rests on the brick street. If it weren’t for the plastic buckets this could almost be a scene from a hundred years ago, but surprisingly, the brick roadbed was installed in the 1970′s to slow down car traffic.

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Plastic tarps create a wall between the market stalls and the street in warmer weather. When workers slide buckets of flowers back on the work tables, the flowers are pressed against the tarp. From the outside, the effect makes me think of an Old Master still life, its colors slightly obscured by centuries of dust and grime.

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The variety of tulips and daffodils is amazing. They’re beautiful from any angle.

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Yes, only $10.00 for these big, fresh bouquets! And you can ask the workers to add a little more of your favorite color, if you like.

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Here’s a link for the market.

My Kinda Culture

My kind of culture is nothing profound, but it can make my day.  Wednesday afternoon I sat down in a high quality French Bakery with a well made iced espresso (good coffee pulled right, a little milk, no sweetener, and not too much ice so I can sip slowly without my drink turning to brown water).  OK, I’m fussy!   I was saying, I sat down with a perfect iced espresso and an incredibly flaky croissant a la framboise (I’ve worked in bakeries, so I’m fussy here, too, and let me tell you, Le Panier does it right…the pastry is buttery and the jam is seedy and thick!)  What was I saying?  Right.  I sat down with a perfect iced espresso, a perfect croissant, in a lively-but-not-too-crazy-noisy French bakery in Seattle, and read the front section of the New York Times.  (Yes I’m fussy about that, too. The Seattle paper? Hugely disappointing. So I’m happy as a pig in s**t when someone leaves the Times at a cafe).  Culture my style.

Taken with my Android phone and edited with Perfect Effects.

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Many more looks at what culture means across this small, precious globe of ours can be found here. Most all of them are more profound than mine.

What I’m Looking At

A State Park with fantastic rock formations, a birch grove unfurling chartreuse leaves, a sod farm, skunk cabbage – even parking lots are looking good to me these days. The day before yesterday I walked down to Pike Place Market after a meeting in Seattle and took loads of photos of the flowers they sell there – that’s for next time.

It’s quieter colors for now:

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I played around with the processing on a few of these photos.  The parking lot -  I rarely do this, but I used an in-camera preset – “toy camera” – I like the effect.

The sixth photo down, of a truck in the sod field viewed through an irrigation line wheel, was taken while I held my sunglasses in front of the camera lens.   They give a warm glow and good cloud definition without the cost of a filter!

Those old irrigation lines with their rusty wheels are still in use, and the farm manager I spoke to doesn’t like them.  The vintage-look photo was done with a sepia preset in Lightroom. Then I added some subtle textures and a border with Perfect Effects (a free program you can find online).

The Black & white windswept tree has a warming filter applied in Photoshop Elements, and the skunk cabbage has a preset called Antique Light, applied in Lightroom, with more fiddling around after that.

Some people say that if you get the picture right in the camera, you don’t need all these effects.  There’s a lot of truth to that. Still, I enjoy experimenting with effects. I usually keep them fairly subtle, and I think I learn more about what I’m looking at as I apply them.

And that’s what it’s about – thinking about what I’m looking at, refining the way I see it, and sharing it with you.

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The weathered sandstone formations are at Larrabee State Park outside of Bellingham, Washington. The birch grove is at Mercer Slough, Bellevue, WA; the parking lot is in Woodinville.  The sod farm is not far from the Microsoft campus in Redmond. The windblown tree is on a knoll that reaches into the Strait of Juan de Fuca, at Rosario Beach on Fidalgo Island, WA.  The skunk cabbage is in a swampy area at Bellevue Botanic Garden, Bellevue, WA.

WHAT’S UP?

I love to look up -  always have – there are intriguing images to be found when you train your eyes to look at the world from different angles.

Sometimes to look up, I look down…

And sometimes I might get down on the ground to look up…

Up may be close at hand or far away into the treetops.

Whether at a cedar tree in a Seattle city park or an architectural gem on the High Line in New York, pointing the lens up rewards me.

Another muscular beauty on the High Line reveals its angles and reflects the clouds differently depending on where you stand.

The meditative expression and intricacies in the carving of this grand Buddha revealed themselves when I gazed up at Dia Tang Temple, a Seattle area Vietnamese Buddhists temple.

Looking up at a botanic garden delights my eyes with the soft pastel colors and underwater shapes of an akebia vine.

In a shady grove of cedars, fern fronds catch sunbeams and cast their shadows on one another. (The tilting LCD on my camera is indispensable when it comes to getting shots like this one.)

Looking at the reflection on the water, I imagine a frog’s-eye view of the grasses that edge the pool.

At the Experience Music Project in Seattle, the jostling angles of  Frank Gehry’s design form endlessly interesting compositions with Seattle’s iconic Space Needle, which looms overhead.

Maybe I shouldn’t have looked up (actually, for me, this is tantamount to an invitation!)

But if I didn’t look up, chances are I would have missed the way budding tree branches mix with their own reflections against a highrise.

When I looked skyward at a downtown building in New York, I focused my lens at a point midway up, ignoring the building’s foundation and its top, and something new happened.

But then New York is newness personified, and gawking at the skyline gives everyone a thrill.  Take that New York habit of looking high up with you wherever you go, point your camera or phone at what you see, and press that shutter.

There are many more ideas and views relating to what’s UP here, at the WordPress Daily Post Photo Challenge.

CHANGING TIDES

Tides nourish the land, and their dependable changes remind me that if life is difficult now, it will get easier…

This week’s Daily Post Weekly Photo Challenge is “Change.”  The serene view above is minutes from a  busy New York City highway. Maybe the beautiful colors were caused by pollution, but that thought was far from my mind as I sat on the beach that evening, lost in the sound of gently lapping waves and the changing hues of sunset.

A receding tide offers foraging opportunities for Willets on Captiva Island in Florida.

The ebb tide lends itself to soft focus, also on Captiva.

Just after high tide, the noise is deafening as waves crash hard onto the rocky Washington shores of Rialto Beach.  Bit by bit, centuries of changing tides have carved a dramatic seascape here.

Happily, the only buildings in the area are well out sight – it’s just rock, water, and sky as far as you can see.

Deception Pass divides two northern Washington islands. Water from the Strait of Juan de Fuca, separating Washington from Canada, is sucked in to Skagit Bay through this narrow passage, creating whirlpools and eddies.

The bridge whose shadow you see was built in the 1930′s – it’s WAY up over the pass, but if you’re not subject to vertigo you can walk across it.

On the  bridge, you can look east towards Swinomish Indian lands,

watch the incoming tide as it ripples and flows,

and gaze straight down into paisley water swirling a tidal song of change.

Just to the north, on a rock in Rosario Bay, a gull perches precariously as an incoming tide approaches gently, leaving soft herringbone patterns on the Pacific blue waters.

In the intertidal zone the tide pools are slowly filling back up, wafting kelp in open circles.

Sea anemones (Anthopleura elegantissima), packed tightly into the tide pools, have closed up shop as the tide is out, but a few are starting to reach their tentacles out into the shallow, nutrient rich water.

At Salt Creek Recreation Area on the Olympic Peninsula the tide is halfway out, exposing a dizzying variety of colorful seaweed on the rocks.

Mussel shells tangle with seaweed on the rocks at my feet. It’s getting late, but gulls, cormorants and ducks will feast here til dusk. Tidelands along the Strait of Juan de Fuca  support a complex ecosystem of plants, invertebrates, numerous species of fish and shellfish, porpoises, whales, sea otters, birds…I’m sure there are other living things I left out. People, for example!

In Seattle the ocean is a hundred miles away but the waters are still subject to tidal changes.

Looking west towards that distant ocean, the Olympic Mountains draw a ragged edge on a golden sunset as a lone pleasure boat heads north on an ebb tide.

More Weekly Photo Challenges on the topic of Change – a BIG one! – can be found here.

Not Just a Walk in the Park

The city of Kirkland, a suburb sitting straight across Lake Washington from Seattle, isn’t the place you’d expect to find deep woods with giant trees and a lush abundance of native plants.  But an effort has been here made to preserve the land – at least some of it – and though logging took its toll long ago, the forest in O.O. Denny Park retains the green magic of a pre-suburban time. I like to wander along the narrow, muddy trail here, wide-eyed with wonder…

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There are giant Red cedars and Douglas firs and the forest floor is packed with Sword ferns. A rushing stream carves a deep V into the ravine, where salmonberries, Devil’s Club and trillium vie with moss and lichens for the narrow light streams filtering through the canopy. It thrills me that it’s all just blocks away from busy suburban streets.

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The park is named for the first white boy born in Seattle – Orion O. Denny. This was the Denny’s country place; later it was a camp. There is nice lake beach access, making it attractive to families in the summer, but I prefer the woods, the trilling wrens, the towering trees and wildflowers.

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One Douglas fir, “Sylvia”,  is 600 years old.  It measured 255′ tall before a storm broke off the top twenty years ago, and at about 27′  in circumference, it still impresses. (The little square at its feet is a plaque).

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The other day I saw the strangest thing in Denny Park -

I was a yard or so off the trail, facing into the woods. At my feet I saw a small red purse, zipped up and carefully wrapped in plastic, and stuffed into the cavity of a decaying branch on the ground. I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t bent down to inspect a wildflower. It seemed like it had been there a while, but I couldn’t be sure.

I was curious, but something made me leave it where it was…fear? propriety? Maybe both.

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O.O. Denny Park – a magical place…

COLOR!

A color challenge/photo challenge…so many colors…so many approaches…let’s just see what happens…

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Color

is a Sol Lewitt piece at the 59th St. Columbus Circle subway station, and

it’s an urban industrial sunset on Staten Island.

Color marches up a sculpture by John Fleming, and soars

against the bluest heaven.

Color is graffiti in Seattle, too – and the intricate thread-work

on an ancient Silk Road Ikat coat, tacked on a museum wall.

Color evolves organically on a rusty old truck

behind a nursery in the Skagit Valley (where soon miles of tulips and daffodils

will set the evening aglow), and it plays games

in a midtown New York store window.

Color is isolated

by a rubber glove dropped in a Seattle alley;

it’s abstract as sun lights a barn window, and it’s the plain

harmony of rust and wildflowers on a rural roadside

in Washington.

And color

dances

when sunbeams illuminate the torn leaf sitting

in my red cabinet.

Color sweetens the deal in pink and

purple stripes: red osier dogwood twigs blended, in camera.

It reflects late day sun

light  – silver and gold: a banner night, and

swirls

in choppy waves across Chihuly glass in Tacoma.

Mid-day summer-sun sits color

flat

on tabletops set out on Seattle sidewalks.

Color ricochets through glasses in an old ship’s galley,

and mushes together as it lays

exposed to the elements,

stuck

on a car door,

abandoned in a field,

somewhere nearby.

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Photographs taken with a Samsung camera phone & a Sony NEX digital camera, in NYC, Seattle, and other locations in the Pacific northwest.

Find more colorful Daily Post Weekly Photo Challenges here.